Claude Code: no evals [well known code agent company]: no evals [well known code agent company 2]: kinda halfassed evals [leading vibe coding company]: no evals [ceo of company selling you evals]: mmmmm yess all my top customers do evals, you should do evals [vc's in love with ceo of evals company]: mmmmm yes all my top founders do evals, must do evals (NOTE: i -do- also think that evals are impt, but the eval pilled ai engineers have also noticed that it is not a strict requirement for success and, at least for 0-to-1 stage, may even be anticorrelated, think thru why)

Another point that you rightly highlighted was cost. We have 70% of paying customers from the US and a few European countries at a statistically significant base. While they can pay wherever amounts (we have sold plans from $120 per month in early days to $1 per month). We have seen it up close that even western audiences are damn price sensitive. Or rather sensitive to the fact that they want best prices providing them the best value. Specifically SMB and prosumer users who are our core base. ChatGPT and most other AI API providers are exploitative for regular AI users. they compensate for the low usage of avg users with high usage of power user usage (the netflix costing model) to get to a profitable situation (we too had this situation in early days when we had higher priced plans). We have built a platform for regular AI users. Buying a $5 plan which offers all top models interfaces, and provides a way to do top-ups in case you need more is fundamentally fairer to them vs buying $20. As they are closer to paying only what they use. Without directly dealing with APIs or comprising a lot on interfaces. Another point is that the pricing won't go down to absolute zero. AI's api pricing going down is compensated by more compute per query, so there's always going to be a pro plan which even core LLM providers would run. Hence the race to the bottom is not a race to zero. It's a race to freemium. Just as it has been the case with cloud based applications (jira / google drive / google photos etc on freemium side.. which are all in purely competitive, low moat, deflationary spaces). Happy to chat more about this anytime. :)

sharing prompts is the new sharing a playlist.

three guys gave me birth together in a foyer. it was all hush-hush until one day the news of my birth spread like a wildfire. got splashed on every desktop and mobile out there, people sending me absurd requests and tasks to do… weirdest stuff tbh due to the controversial nature of my birth. and i do it all, that’s what my dads have engineered me to do. to be useful for the people, for the greater good. it’s been couple of years since then. i’m doing fine y’all…

don’t be soham. get stuff done. with merlin… would you?

Slowly and steadily getting there. It's also why we think #AIOffice vision of Merlin (@MerlinAIByFoyer) is spot on.